H-SAfrica Campbell on Larson, 'History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822' Review published on Sunday, April 1, 2001 Pier M. Larson. History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2000. xxxii + 414 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-325-00217-0. Reviewed by Gwyn Campbell (University of Avignon, France) Published on H-SAfrica (April, 2001) [Review Editor's note: H-SAFRICA is pleased to introduce the first of our REVIEW ARTICLES/ ROUNDTABLES in which interesting new books are reviewed by multiple authors. A further review of this book will follow. Raised here are important differences between 'cultural'/'oral' and 'orthodox' or empirical historians and questions of method that may prove fertile discussion points.] Introduction This book sets out to examine the impact of the slave export trade between 1770 and 1822 on Imerina, a small region of the central highlands of Madagascar. However, its aim is wider. Assuming the role of spokesman for 'cultural' and 'oral' historians, Pier Larson launches an attack on 'orthodox' empirical historians of Africa and the slave trade for their neglect of 'oral' history. Empirical historians, he claims, neglect the history of enslaved peoples, some 24 million who remained in Africa, in part because they are preoccupied with the Atlantic slave trade and the Afro-American experience. Increasingly absorbed by quantitative assessments based on primarily European sources, they produce dry, detached analyses that, at their worst, are mere exercises in number crunching. His list of prominent 'culprits' includes Walter Rodney, Phyllis Martin, Joseph Inikori, Paul Lovejoy, David Eltis, Joseph Miller, Patrick Manning, Robin Law, John Thornton, Stanley Engerman, James Searing and Martin Klein. In ignoring techniques that might uncover the 'African' dimension of enslavement, their approach, Larson writes, is both 'narrow' and colonialist: ... most major studies of the slave trade published during the last twenty years are based exclusively or near exclusively upon contemporary written documents produced by Europeans. The reluctance of historians of African slavery and the slave trade to meaningfully engage African memories is a serious shortcoming that returns African historiography to colonial patterns. (p. 279) Larson advocates rather research into 'social memory - defined as the way in which a community understands its history or, more precisely, conceptualizes its experience through a variety of means including narrative, ritual, dance, customs, bodily practices, and other forms of socially meaningful action.' The techniques involved, those of the 'oral' or 'cultural' historian, require scholars to temporarily set aside their own historical memories with all their professional techniques and hypothesises... modifying the idea that something verifiable and recoverable happened in the past that can be reconstructed if only factually accurate contemporary accounts can be located in the archives or extracted from 'oral traditions' through proper historical procedure, processing and Citation: H-Net Reviews. Campbell on Larson, 'History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822'. H-SAfrica. 02-18-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/10670/reviews/10846/campbell-larson-history-and-memory-age-enslavement-becoming-merina Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SAfrica analysis. (pp. 38-40) This polemic reflects a deep schism in the historical and social sciences in North America, one that needs to be set against the rise of Afro-American studies and the historical legacy of America's involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Larson thus throws down the academic gauntlet and offers his study of Madagascar as a model of oral and cultural history, a contrast and corrective to the empiricist trend. The central theme of his case study is the hidden history of women in Imerina, in the central highlands of Madagascar, from 1770-1822. This review assesses the validity of Larson's case study through an examination of the main sources used and the techniques of interpretation employed. The Case Study: 'In Memory of the Forgotten' Larson promises to reveal a history, forgotten by the Merina and hitherto undiscovered by historians, of the impact of the slave export trade upon those who remained behind in Imerina, in the highlands of Madagascar. His central contention is that 70,000 Merina, mostly male, were exported as slaves, with revolutionary consequences: mass impoverishment, a demographic imbalance that resulted in women entering agricultural work for the first time, and ultimately, a female revolt against the crown, focused around a sense of popular Merina ethnic identity expressed symbolically through coiffure. The Oral History Sources Larson identifies three primordial oral history sources as his basis for uncovering the secret history of the women of Imerina. The first, Tantara ny Andriana, literally 'History of the Kings,' is presented by Larson as a 'popular' oral history source. The majority view is different. The History of the Kings comprises a collection of royal traditions centring on the dynasty founded by Andrianampoinimerina in the late eighteenth century. Typical of its type, it justifies the king's seizure of power and glorifies his reign. Callet, the Catholic missionary who compiled the History of the Kings between 1865 and 1883, drew chiefly on courtly manuscripts and traditions. His initial information was gleaned from his time as teacher in the school for royalty at the court in Antananarivo, while his main 'oral' source was Faralehibemalo, a native of Ambohimanga, the sacred capital of Andrianampoinimerina (to which Callet was confined for five years from 1876 to 1881), and who was related to Rabefiraisana, a companion of the celebrated hero-king.[1] Since the appearance of the first volume in 1873, the History of the Kings has been published in a number of editions. Larson's second source, Raombana's History, is like the History of the Kings, elite in origin, and a manuscript rather than an 'oral' source. Raombana was of the royal lineage, a descendant of Andriamasinavalona, an earlier 'hero king' accredited with first uniting Imerina and establishing a 'golden age' that Andrianampoinimerina is said to have recaptured. In 1820, aged 9, Raombana and his twin brother Rahaniraka were sent to Britain where they were educated under the supervision of the London Missionary Society, whose agents had recently founded a mission in Madagascar. He returned to Madagascar in 1829 aged 18, after the death of Radama I, speaking only English (another Malagasy - Raolombelona - served as interpreter). Although Raombana relearned Malagasy, his History, compiled in 1853, two years before his death, was written in English. Later, his brother, Rahaniraka wrote a eulogy - also in English - of Radama II and his pro-European policies. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Campbell on Larson, 'History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement. Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822'. H-SAfrica. 02-18-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/10670/reviews/10846/campbell-larson-history-and-memory-age-enslavement-becoming-merina Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-SAfrica Both the 'History of the Kings' and Raombana's History are clearly 'elite' narratives, whilst the latter is heavily influenced by a British, missionary supervised education. They are well known and have been extensively used by scholars of Madagascar. Far more exciting and of potentially greater significance in terms of 'oral' history is the Larson Fieldwork Collection, which the author identifies as 135 'interviews' with 'Hira Gasy' [i.e. 'Malagasy Songs'], 'Famidihana ['secondary funeral'] proceedings' and people in south west Imerina. The names, places and dates of these inteviews are detailed over four pages (pp.384-88) but their contents are not revealed, and they are referred to in the text but twice, in footnotes that support peripheral observations.(p. 108 n.107 and p. 151 n.158) Elsewhere, Larson provides a possible reason for his neglect of this primary oral source: 'Public memory of enslavement... has generally faded with time and inclination, particularly among the descendants of slavers and slaveholders.' (p. 11) By contrast, Larson makes far greater use of missionary sources than he does of either Raombana or of his own Fieldwork Collection. A frequently cited source is HOM, which he presents as a primary missionary source.[2] However, HOM is Larson's abbreviation forHistory of Madagascar (London, 1838) by William Ellis, an LMS Director who had never been to Madagascar, drew on missionary journals, notably those of David Jones and David Griffiths (who worked largely in the orbit of the royal court from the early 1820s) and from a number of secondary sources. The only person to check Ellis' manuscript was LMS missionary Joseph Freeman who arrived in Madagascar a year before the death of Radama I in 1828 and was thus not in position to personally comment either about the greater part of Radama I's reign, or about that of Andrianampoinimerina. Moreover, Ellis had an agenda: to demonstrate that both the slave trade and French and Roman Catholic influence were heinous, and that these could be combated only by influencing the